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FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

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Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#171

Post by amazon_not »

conradev wrote: post #92
subverter wrote: post #39

This raises the limit on the number of subscribers a provider can have before regulation kicks in. In other words, a larger number of smaller providers have one less regulation to worry about. Isn't more competition among providers what we want? Shouldn't we be doing everything we can – even if it's saving 6.8 hours per year in regulatory compliance – to help these smaller guys be able to take on these horrible behem…

Don't paid peering deals (i.e. Netflix paying Comcast) only reinforce the competitive advantage that these horrible behemoths have?

Pretty much. Everybody else pays for their bandwidth. Only Comcast has the market power to demand payment for access to their customers.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#172

Post by wtallis »

grandalf wrote: post #130
wtallis wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backbone capacity is a separate issue from last-mile connectivity. Only one is truly a natural monopoly. I don't care whether YouTube directly builds out backbone capacity or whether they outsource that to Level 3. Incumbent last-mile providers enjoy a privileged position that gives them unfair bargaining power over end users. They should not be allowed to decide which content providers and applications get to have a…

> If anybody gets to pick winners and losers like that, it should be a democratically elected government, but it would be far better to just prohibit last-mile providers from imposing unfair artificial limits or costs. Isn't it the proper authority of the FTC or DOJ to enforce anticompetitive behavior? Do we need the FCC also dipping in to impose penalties on firms who may have already spent a lot of money in the spe…

> To your last point, what if T-Mobile showed that by following its preferred QoS scheme it actually transferred more information over its last mile link?

That is very obviously not even close to being the right metric. All you need to do is find the one customer with their laptop tethered and running Backblaze or bittorrent, and give him all the bandwidth. Don't bother slicing up the airtime to serve other customers, because that'll just reduce the total data rate.

> Should T-Mobile sacrifice $1M in profit each month simply so that any customers who happen to be using an obscure protocol can get slightly better service?

Yes, unless they're prepared to stop advertising it as an Internet connection. If they're all allowed to be an "Internet service provider" that is really just a HTTP(s) service provider, then we're shutting out any invention that isn't well-suited to what T-Mobile can double-charge for—any P2P application, incompatible but superior successors like QUIC, and more specialized protocols like SCTP. Technologies that are obscure today could be lucrative and more resource-efficient next year, if allowed to blossom.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#173

Post by amazon_not »

fallingfrog wrote: post #85

I suppose one way to enforce net neutrality might be to route all traffic through TOR.. that might mess up the caching for a service like Netflix though. (Could someone who knows more than I do comment on that?)

Tor does not help against net neutrality violations. Tor only helps if you want some anonymity for your traffic.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#174

Post by taw24 »

massysett wrote: post #112
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a case to be had for how vertical-integration makes businesses more efficient and means there can be some cost-savings for consumers (e.g. if Comcast zero-rated their own streaming video service and included it in their customers' cable Internet fees then consumers would save $10/mo they wouldn't be paying to Netflix - in much the same way Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer meant no-one pays for Netsc…

As a NN opponent, you have somewhat captured my viewpoint. Mostly I think NN is fighting the last war. NN proponents continually assert there is no competition for wired Internet and, therefore, it must be regulated. I think looking at wired Internet defines much too narrow a market. As wireless proliferates, it will become increasingly important, and competition in wireless is alive and well. The recent reignition o…

> So in short I see no problem here to solve and I do not think government should get involved.

That's patently absurd. You can't just add a natural monopoly to a public good and come up with a competitive market. The most basic of economic analysis -- really, first semester stuff -- would tell you that these are the precise situations where external regulation is needed to even approach something that looks like an efficient distribution of resources.

I would describe your economic philosophy as something closer to a religion, but even most religions aren't provably incorrect.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#175

Post by JoshTriplett »

amazon_not wrote: post #158
JoshTriplett wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you phrase it as just "don't prioritize traffic", you've just broken most CDNs, as well as QoS that optimizes for latency/bandwidth to improve VoIP and similar. There's absolutely nothing wrong with, for instance, a content provider handing an ISP a box that sits on their network, mirrors/caches content, and serves it up to that ISP's customers. That helps the content provider, the ISP, and the ISP's customers. An…

> If you phrase it as just "don't prioritize traffic", you've just broken most CDNs, as well as QoS that optimizes for latency/bandwidth to improve VoIP and similar. This is simply incorrect. CDNs are not prioritized on any ISP network. CDNs work because they have a shorter route to the end user, not because they have a higher priority. ISPs should not and do not apply QoS in their core for VoIP or anything else when…

> CDNs are not prioritized on any ISP network. CDNs work because they have a shorter route to the end user, not because they have a higher priority.

So, anyone who can successfully define what they're doing as "not prioritizing" can entirely sidestep any regulation you have in mind.

Putting a server in the ISP's datacenter is a common approach. Traffic to those servers doesn't have to go over any external peering links.

> ISPs should not and do not apply QoS in their core

Many do. As one simple example, look at the ISPs that accelerate the first N bytes of connections, to prioritize interactive requests over bulk transfers/downloads. Other ISPs apply more sophisticated approaches.

> It's pretty obvious how you draw that bright line. Don't prioritize and don't congest interfaces.

> forbid prioritizing and saturation of network interconnects

So, receive and deliver all traffic, regardless of available capacity or financial constraints? Provision every part of the network so it can handle all the traffic passing over any other part, because they're not allowed to limit bandwidth in any way at any point?

A saturated interconnect might mean "we're trying to screw Netflix", or it might mean "we can't afford it right now" (either because they're a small ISP and don't have the money, or because they're spending it on something their customers want more).

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#176

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

massysett wrote: post #160
cstejerean wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireless competition is only alive because the government blocked the merger of T-Mobile and AT&T and then of Spring and T-Mobile. This then forced T-Mobile (and now Sprint) to get creative in trying to compete with Verizon and AT&T. Also, wireless is not really competition for home internet. Try cancelling your home internet service and relying solely on one of the wireless carriers and see how far you'll get. The l…

Wireless is not for everyone--not yet. However, many people do not use a lot of bandwidth and they may find wireless to be quite adequate. As wireless bandwidth goes up in quality and down in price, people might truly start to "cut the cord". Twenty years ago you could substitute "cellular" for "wireless" and "landline" for "home internet" and make the same claims. No one dreamed people would eliminate land phones ba…

A strange thing I've noticed about telecoms in the US is that prices never fall - instead consumers just get more value and are constantly upsold higher-value offerings - this is not a bad thing in itself, but whereas in the UK and most of Europe I can get a a few gigs of 4G/LTE data for my phone for about €10 - something you'd have to pay $50+ for in the USA. The same goes for home internet - the cheapest non-promotional rate in my area is $45/mo for 10mbps, but pay $20/more and you get 100mbps. Why isn't there a sub-$30/mo offering? I believe these prices remain comparable to what they cost (sans-handset subsidy cost) over the past 20+ years.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#177

Post by bmelton »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #146
massysett wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a NN opponent, you have somewhat captured my viewpoint. Mostly I think NN is fighting the last war. NN proponents continually assert there is no competition for wired Internet and, therefore, it must be regulated. I think looking at wired Internet defines much too narrow a market. As wireless proliferates, it will become increasingly important, and competition in wireless is alive and well. The recent reignition o…

> I am struck by the arrogance of the belief that the government knows best how to regulate this market. No worse than the belief that companies, in natural monopoly , will act in the best interests of consumers either. There are many places in the world where the government does work well and in the best interests of their populations - I'm disappointed the "government is inherently bad" meme is so well-entrenched i…

Not for nothing, but most people of that mindset don't believe that the government is inherently bad, but that government powers should be closely and judiciously kept to a minimum to prevent it being used for bad.

There's a difference there, but like most arguments on the internet, the nuance tends to get lost in the retelling.

Regarding net neutrality, if memory serves correctly, it was but a few short weeks after the passage of NN that somebody was wanting to leverage the FCC's new powers to censor ISIS off of the internet. Wheeler, being a good guy, connoted that they didn't have that authority, and that even if it could be construed that they did, he was disinclined to exert it and give credence to the argument that they did have that power.

All of that was done basically in "the right way", but given the wild swings in administration changes, who's to say that some other head of the FCC wouldn't have been inclined to leverage the power that they might now have for exactly that reason? Are we sure that the courts would agree that NN doesn't give the FCC the right to censor individual websites? Are we sure that the courts of tomorrow won't?

Yes, I know that this is a slippery slope argument, and I understand the inherent pitfalls therein, but that doesn't change the fact that power can be used maliciously, and for some of us, the question of whether or not the problem is worth potentially sacrificing much larger swaths of the first amendment falls differently than for others. I personally don't fault any individual for whichever way they've decided, as there are possible curtilages of free speech on either side of the coin, but I'd like us to agree that being suspicious of vesting power unto an agency otherwise wholly unaccountable to the public is perhaps not the dumbest thing that Americans do.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#178

Post by JoshTriplett »

amazon_not wrote: post #166
JoshTriplett wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument isn't "this is complicated so let's not"; it's "this is complicated and needs to be handled with care, not with a trivial attempted fix like 'dumb pipes only' the way people often seem to think". Together with a healthy dose of "regulation has historically failed to adapt to future technologies". And we don't really want regulations that privilege the tech we currently know over the future tech we don't;…

> "this is complicated and needs to be handled with care, not with a trivial attempted fix like 'dumb pipes only' the way people often seem to think" Why do you think turning ISPs into dumb pipes only would not fix most, if not all, problems? The reason we have all these problems is that the ISPs do not want to be dumb pipes only.

Because many customers don't actually want a dumb pipe.

Dumb pipes don't come with email addresses.

Dumb pipes serve YouTube more slowly, and might not have the capacity for HD/4K video. (Look at what server the video comes from; if you're on a major ISP, the server name likely has your ISP's name in it.)

Dumb pipes serve Netflix more slowly.

Dumb pipes can't hold as many customers.

Dumb pipes might not get as many customers.

Dumb pipes cost more.

Personally, I'd like a dumb pipe only as far as the nearest major datacenter, and then quite a lot of smarts in that datacenter. I don't just want a raw connection to a major bandwidth provider, though.

See also the last paragraph of my previous reply: I'd be in favor of separating out the "dumb pipe" as a utility, and then having ISPs operate independently from that. I think that would solve the majority of the problems.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#179

Post by massysett »

taw24 wrote: post #174
massysett wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a NN opponent, you have somewhat captured my viewpoint. Mostly I think NN is fighting the last war. NN proponents continually assert there is no competition for wired Internet and, therefore, it must be regulated. I think looking at wired Internet defines much too narrow a market. As wireless proliferates, it will become increasingly important, and competition in wireless is alive and well. The recent reignition o…

> So in short I see no problem here to solve and I do not think government should get involved. That's patently absurd. You can't just add a natural monopoly to a public good and come up with a competitive market. The most basic of economic analysis -- really, first semester stuff -- would tell you that these are the precise situations where external regulation is needed to even approach something that looks like an…

The market for internet access is not just wires running in the street; it's also wireless. Railroads seemed a natural monopoly too, until trucks came along. Thus the Staggers Act, so the "natural monopoly" rail rates are not regulated.

Now it's the reverse. In the dawn of a new technological age, people want to shackle the old technology rather than deregulate it.

My economic philosophy is no religion; the government regulates the distribution of wireless spectrum and I have no objection to that, nor do I object to the regulation of wireline operators in exchange for their use of public rights-of-way. But this regulation should be measured and the minimum amount necessary. Net neutrality regulations are far beyond minimal.

So please continue on with demonstrating where what I have said is provably incorrect?

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#180

Post by grandalf »

wtallis wrote: post #172
grandalf wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anybody gets to pick winners and losers like that, it should be a democratically elected government, but it would be far better to just prohibit last-mile providers from imposing unfair artificial limits or costs. Isn't it the proper authority of the FTC or DOJ to enforce anticompetitive behavior? Do we need the FCC also dipping in to impose penalties on firms who may have already spent a lot of money in the spe…

> To your last point, what if T-Mobile showed that by following its preferred QoS scheme it actually transferred more information over its last mile link? That is very obviously not even close to being the right metric. All you need to do is find the one customer with their laptop tethered and running Backblaze or bittorrent, and give him all the bandwidth. Don't bother slicing up the airtime to serve other customers…

Don't you think there's enough demand for halfway decent VPN service that a fair bit of market incentive exists for T-Mobile not to hinder opaque packets too much?
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